The State Department’s Response to the 2012 DIA Islamic State Document

FMR Director of the DIA Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn will discuss the 2012 Defense Intelligence report that predicts “an Islamic State” would arise as a result of the West’s desire to “isolate the Syrian regime” in an upcoming Al Jazeera interview set to air July 31.

Al Jazeera’s early press release indicates that Flynn says of the document concerning the origins of ISIL’s meteoric rise that: “I think it was a decision, I think it was a willful decision.”

Thus far the highest level denial of the document’s significance has come from the State Department in a June 4 daily press briefing.

Note that spokesperson Marie Harf ignores the essence of the question, which asks her to comment on the origins of ISIL in light of the DIA report, instead merely holding up GCC countries as currently part of the anti-ISIL coalition.

The below is the relevant section of the transcript from State.gov (see video above starting at the 29:45 mark):

QUESTION: It is striking, though, how similar – how what’s happening currently does chime in with the prediction we now know that the Defense Intelligence Agency made in 2012 that a Salafist principality might grow up in eastern Syria and western Iraq, and that – in fact, that was the policy. That’s what – the goal of the GCC countries, your allies in the region. Would you accept that that’s what’s happened?

MS HARF: Well, I think you’re making a number of sort of sweeping generalizations.

QUESTION: That was the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2012.

MS HARF: Well, I haven’t read the whole DIA report. I’m happy to go back and pull that and take a look at it. There was a lot of assessment done at the time about the possible futures – directions that Iraq could take, certainly. So I’m happy to go back and look at those, but —

QUESTION: You don’t think it’s the goal of the GCC to have some sort of Salafist area there to be a sort of bulwark against Iran?

MS HARF: I think the fact that GCC and regional countries are taking direct military action against ISIL in the region now, I think, should make it pretty clear how they feel about ISIL.